


Land of Shadows

by chiiyo86



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mythology References, POV First Person, Post-Apocalypse, Psychic Abilities, Siblings, sentient house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28962864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: My name is Semiramis and I live after the end of the world.
Relationships: Psychic Kids On The Run & Protective Sentient Location
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Land of Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> I'd been interested in this tag for a while and I'm glad I finally gotten around to writing it. Hope you enjoy this treat!

My name is Semiramis. I chose it myself, after the legendary queen from the long-gone country of Assyria, daughter of the fish-goddess Derketo of Ascalon. The sisters didn’t name any of us—when we were little, I was always ‘girl’ and my brothers were ‘boy’ or maybe ‘you, boy’ to make it clear which one of them they were talking to. My brothers also chose names for themselves: there’s Oisín, or Sheen for short, after the poet and warrior of the country Ireland, and Muninn, or Mun, after the mythical raven—that’s a kind of black bird, or so I’ve read—that serves as a spy and messenger for the god Odin. I suppose that Mun’s name of choice is meant as a joke of some sort, though it’s always hard to tell with Mun. 

I call Sheen and Mun my brothers, but in truth I don’t know if we’re related, at least in the sense that the biology books I’ve read tell me. Sister Sherin used to tell us stories, that she called ‘tales’ or ‘myths’, and it’s in one of them, entitled ‘Brother and Sister’, that we came across the concept of siblings for the first time. It seemed to fit what we were to each other, so since that day we’ve called each other brothers and sister. We look rather different from each other—my skin is much darker than either of them, and Mun has clear blue eyes when Sheen’s and mine are both shades of brown, but he has thick dark hair like me, though not as curly. Despite the obvious features that set us apart, there’s something about our eyes, almond-shaped, and our hooked noses, that is similar—so who knows, really. Whether we’re actual siblings or not, we must have had parents, however many of them, but none of the sisters have ever answered our questions on the subject. Some of them, like Sister Esther or Sister Kuki, will just harrumph and tell us to stop asking pointless questions, while others, like Sister Sherin, will smile sadly and shake their heads. Whoever our parents are, they have to be dead anyway. They must be, because everyone else is. 

—-

The sisters called it The End of Time. They said that a great evil, which they called ‘The Dusk’, had overcome the world years ago and that civilization had crumbled down to dust. We were told that nothing existed outside of the Fort, where we grew up, except for a dead world and the Dusk’s lurking presence. Why we’d been preserved, how they could be sure that no one else had survived, were some of the questions that they shrugged or shook their heads at. The only thing that they were willing to say was that my brothers and I were the only ones who had the power to get the world rid of the Dusk’s corrupting presence. What that meant, exactly, was left for us to guess.

We grew up inside the Fort’s old, thick, moss-covered stone walls, in the long arched corridors, playing in the enclosed space of the inner garden. We didn’t know what stood beyond the outside walls and the peeks we’d had didn’t show us much. There were two types of days after the End of Time: either the fog had thinned enough that we could see a pale disk hang in the sky, which we’d been told was the sun, or it was so thick that it clung to the Fort’s walls and you couldn’t see the shape of your own hands. The world outside as it used to be was something that belonged to books, the ones that Sister Sherin and later Sister Ae read to us. The tales of our early childhood were replaced by longer books, more complex stories, that had no gods or talking animals or magic or raging sea serpents, no mythical kings and queens leading armies. The books sometimes had pictures, either drawings or oddly realistic pictures that looked like windows to the world of before. Some of those books, said Sister Ae, were ‘fiction’, meaning that the stories had been invented by their authors, while others were books you learn from. 

The latter sort I mostly read by myself when I snuck into the Second Library—a puzzling name, since we had no First Library. The Second Library was locked and we weren’t supposed to get in, but Sister Ae, who kept the key, tended to take a nap around midday and she was easy to steal from. It was hard to know what to make of all the information I found in the books I read, as some of it contradicted itself and I had no way to check it. As for the world of today, _I_ hadn’t seen any of it, but Sheen had. It was his ability—his _power_ or his _gift_ , as the sisters called it—that he could see with his mind’s sight beyond wide distances, things that his actual eyes had never been set on, his spirit wandering over the dead lands. I once asked him whether it felt like flying, but he said that all he felt was his actual body sitting cross-legged on the cold floor of the Fort. 

“It’s pretty boring, you know,” he’d said, probably because he could easily read how much I envied him. “With the fog, I can barely see anything anyway. Just, like, trees and empty lands and sometimes the shape of some ruins.”

With the years, Sheen had become able to see through some greater distances, and he’d never noticed any traces of other people’s presence. If the sisters had lied, at least it seemed like they hadn’t lied about this. On the other hand, he’d never seen anything that looked like a great evil powerful enough to end the world. He and I were of the opinion that maybe the Dusk wasn’t out there anymore—well, Sheen thought it had disappeared or died, if it could die, whereas _I_ thought that it had never existed in the first place, though that wasn’t something I could voice where the sisters could hear me. Mun never shared his thoughts on the matter, but I felt like he didn’t agree with us. Sometimes I wondered whether the shadows weren’t murmuring things to him. 

The shadows were Mun’s power, which the sisters never called a ‘gift’ the way they did with my or Sheen’s abilities. He could shape them, extend them, use them to absorb light in a room. Nothing scary in itself, but the shadows he touched became something more than the simple absence of light—or maybe he just revealed what was already there. The shadows gave off a sense of cold, a chilling touch of fear, and sometimes, if you strained to listen, you could hear whispers come out of them. The whispers were never loud enough to be intelligible, or at least not for anyone but Mun. He was cagey about it, but at the way his head tilted sometimes, the way his face crumpled in focus, I was sure that he understood at least some of what those whispers were about. The sisters were never comfortable with the shadows, though to be fair, neither were Sheen and me. The point is, the shadows are the reason why we finally decided to leave the Fort.

If you’d asked me back when I still lived there whether I was happy, I don’t think I would have had an answer for you. I’d never known anything else. Some of the sisters were nice, some were distant, a couple were downright mean. Some vanished, like Sister Sherin, though I figured later that she must have died. With their severe gray robes and the gray veils that covered their hair, the heavy pendants with the four interlocking circles, symbol of their order, hanging around their necks, the sisters were our caretakers and our guardians. As I got older, I grew frustrated with how vague they were about too many things, and bitter about the fact that they were my only source of knowledge outside of the books. When we were little, we were allowed to roam free in most of the Fort except for a few rooms. The sisters taught us to read and count, and as I already said, some of them read to us and told us stories, but the rest of the time we played with each other in relative freedom. In the years before we left, though, that freedom started to get progressively more restricted. We had a curfew, past which we weren’t supposed to leave our rooms, and got scolded if we got too close from the outside walls. We spent more time practicing our powers, learning how to increase their range, doing breathing exercises to improve our focus and control. They never outright said it, but I was convinced that they were preparing us for something.

We didn’t know how old we were exactly. I learned what ‘birthdays’ and ‘years’ were from the stories I heard or read. The sisters didn’t keep track of passing time, or if they did, they didn’t bother sharing their calendar with us. Once I was old enough, I started counting the days until I could make months, then years. I started it eight years before we left, and though I don’t know how old I was at the time, I had been reading and counting for a while by then, so I decided I was eight, which made me sixteen years old for our departure. I’d always cast myself as the older sister, since Sheen and Mun used to be smaller than me, so I decided they were one year younger. Later, they shot way past me in height and took offense to the idea that they might be younger, but I secretly never changed my mind about it. 

As the self-proclaimed older sister, I felt protective of them. My favorite tales were of sisters protecting their brothers, like in ‘The Seven Ravens’, where the heroine chops off her own finger to save her brothers. I thought about it at night sometimes, wondering if I would be capable of cutting off my own finger to save Sheen or Mun. If they’d particularly annoyed me that day, I would tell myself that they could rot for all I cared, but otherwise I liked to think that I would. So when I started to worry about the sideway glances that the sisters were throwing at Mun, I felt it was down to me to elaborate a plan of action. 

“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” asked Sheen, ever so cautious, when I told my brothers about my plan. “You promised you would stop using your power to snoop. You know what’ll happen if the sisters realize what you’re doing.”

“I’ll get punished, I know, but it doesn’t matter. I want to know what they’re planning.”

“Maybe they’re not planning anything, have you thought of that?”

“They’ve stopped training Mun entirely but are still training you and me. You’ve seen how they look at him. Mun, you agree with me, right?” He didn’t reply, so I snapped my fingers near his nose. “Hey, Muninn!” 

He startled and blinked at me. “What?”

We were sitting on cushions in one of the galleries of the northern wing, our legs slipped between the pillars of the stone railing and hanging down. I saw a long, thin shadow slither back from where Mun was resting his hand, like a tentacle retracting to a much bigger monster. A tendril of unease curled at the pit of my stomach. Had the shadow been talking to him? This was happening more frequently than before. I swallowed, kept from talking by a lump of fear in my throat.

“Sem wants to spy on the sisters,” Sheen explained, oblivious or better than me at ignoring his discomfort. “She thinks they, uh—”

“They’re wary of me,” Mun said. He was looking over the railing, at the door behind the railing on the other side that lead to the sisters’ dormitory. “I know. But what can we do about it?”

“If they’re just wary then it’s… well, not fine, but we can deal with it. I just worry that they’re planning something more…”

“What, you think they’ll get rid of him or something?” Sheen said with a nervous laugh, gaze flicking from me to Mun as though he wanted one of us to contradict him. “Are you serious?”

Mun said nothing, still staring ahead, but a muscle in his cheek jumped. 

“I hope it’s nothing,” I said. “But if it’s _something_ , then we’ll have—”

_‘Little brother took his little sister by the hand and said, ‘Since our mother died we have had no happiness; our stepmother beats us every day… Come, we will go forth together into the wide world.’’_

“—we’ll have to leave here.”

“Leave for _where_?” Sheen asked, lowering his voice to a distraught whisper. “There’s nothing out there, Sem. Believe me, I know.”

“It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing. We’ll make _something_. Anyway, it’s too soon to fret about it.” I pulled my legs back to me, one after the other, and gripped the railing to haul myself to my feet. “I’m going inside.”

Sheen could see in places where he wasn’t, and he could have spied on the sisters if only his power hadn’t been merely visual. We’d seen Sister Esther and Sister Maryat leave the dormitory a few minutes ago, so we knew that no one was inside. I made my way to the door, my palms sweaty from nerves. I felt like I was crossing a line, doing this. The sisters had taught me that I shouldn’t use my power to infringe on other people’s privacy—they mostly meant _their_ privacy, of course, since I spent almost every minute of every day with Mun and Sheen, and there was no one else around. I was about to do just the very thing they’d proscribed.

We weren’t supposed to go to the sisters’ dormitory, but it wasn’t so forbidden that they would lock the door. There’d never been anything of interest to us in it, not until today. I opened the door slowly, casting anxious looks left and right before I slipped inside. I entered a long, narrow room with a row of neat white beds on my left, each with a nightstand and a truck, and a row of large windows in front of me. I walked along the beds, thinking of what the best spot to try my power on would be. Wood retained more than plaster or stone, maybe because it had been organic once. I approached one of the windows, which overlooked the inner garden. I couldn’t see much because of the fog, just the shadowy outlines of some fern clusters. I didn’t care about the view, though, so I rested my hands on the wooden windowsill and closed my eyes, letting the images and feelings flow in. 

This is my power: I read the imprints, mostly emotions, something fragments of memories, that we leave all around us. They surround me at all time, but I’ve learned to ignore them most of it, the way you can choose to tune out a distant conversation. I tuned in, then, sifting through the layers of day-to-day tiredness, boredom, worry, echoing footsteps, creaking beds, murmured conversations, rare peals of laughter—straight to the fresher imprints. 

“— _a bit radical? The boy hasn’t done anything.”_

This was Sister Maryat’s low gravelly voice, pitched to a murmur.

“ _Hasn’t done anything so far. Are we supposed to wait until something does happen? Until_ it _happens again?_ ”

“ _But are we sure that the boy’s shadows are linked to the Dusk? We need to be sure, and I’m not. We watched the boy grow up, Esther. We raised him! We can’t—”_

 _“We knew this might happen. The children’s powers can’t be natural. We always knew there could be a connection to_ it. _We took that risk, but we have to be smart about it. Have you seen the way he listens to those shadows? Don’t you wonder what they’re telling him? We can’t afford to wait any longer and you know the others will side with me.”_

I was jerked out of the memory by my own gasp. For a moment I stood there, my heart pounding, paralyzed by startling fear. I had been right, but to hear it confirmed was a shock I hadn’t been ready for. I had told my brothers that we would run away if Mun was in danger, but I realized then that we would actually need to do it. I had not, deep down, confronted what it meant to leave. What it would mean to leave the only place we’d ever known, the people who had taken care of us, never mind how much I complained about them, for an unfriendly world covered in fog. Who knew what awaited us out there? What Sheen had seen didn’t amount to much. We might starve to death without the sisters’ kitchen garden, or fall prey to the mysterious evil that they’d told us nothing about and that I’d always scoffed at.

We didn’t have any other choice, though. Even Sheen had to admit it when I told him and Mun what I’d heard. For the next few days, we prepared for the journey, stealing a bit of food from the kitchen every day, packing clothes, blankets, candles and matches. Which each passing day I grew more nervous, simultaneously feeling like we weren’t ready and like we should have left already. The more stressed I was, the more stressed I made my brothers. Mun became so silent that it felt like he’d turned into a shadow himself, while Sheen made up for it by filling the silence with his ramblings on increasingly random subjects. I was afraid that the sisters would notice that something was amiss and tried to touch everything they’d touched to grasp for their wayward memories and feelings, but other than having it confirmed that they were afraid of Mun, I didn’t get any indication that they knew what we were up to.

The sisters never left the Fort, so the best moment to make our escape would be at night, which pleased none of us. The prospect of leaving was scary enough without having to do it in the depth of the night. Thanks to Sheen’s power, we knew a little about the path out of the Fort and what lay beyond. A single path snaked down the hill upon which the Fort stood. At the bottom of it was a large forest of tall dark trees and somewhere in it was a house. We hoped to reach that house as a first stop in our journey, and that the sisters would be too afraid of the outside world to follow us there.

For our departure, we chose a night when the fog wasn’t so thick that we would trip on our own feet. Escaping was easier than expected. Because we’d always been warned against the dangers of the outside world, I imagine the sisters didn’t think that we would ever try to leave. The only obstacle was the outside wall, which we dealt with by climbing on each other’s shoulders and then roping down on the other side using bedsheets. The path down the hill was bordered by broken poles, vestiges of the old world whose function we ignored. The fog revealed them one by one, shredding around them like a torn veil. I didn’t know why they spooked me so badly, but I was shivering until we got to the bottom of the hill, and it wasn’t just because of the cool night air. 

Once we reached the forest, I paradoxically felt much more at ease, even though we could barely see where we were going. It was silent in the forest, a heavy, blanketed quiet, and the trees bordering the path were slashes of darkness beneath the fog, but the silence felt peaceful rather than ominous. It suddenly hit me that we were fully out of the Fort’s reach and had stepped foot in the outside world. For the first time, we were truly _outside_. I walked on the cushy layers of dead leaves and dead pine needles feeling rushes of excitement mixed with thrilled terror. I was like Oisín, my brother’s namesake, when he first entered Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth. 

_‘And Oisín marvelled at everything around him, for never was water so blue or trees so stately as those he saw, and the forest was alive with the hum of bees and the song of birds, and the creatures that are wild in other lands, the deer and the red squirrel and the wood-dove, came, without fear, to be caressed.’_

The woods we were walking through didn’t have any living beings that we could hear or see, and couldn’t have been more different from the descriptions the stories made of Tír na nÓg, but I felt the same sense of mystical wonder I imagine Oisín felt. We’d brought a lantern with us, and once we were out of sight of the Fort and inside the forest, Mun lit up a candle and placed it inside. Because of the fog, it didn’t do much except light a few feet in front of us and then bounce back against the misty veil. Still, it was a comfort against the darkness and silence of the forest. Our steps made almost no sound, when we were used to the echoes of walking the stone floors of the Fort. Some of my excitement waned, leaving mostly discomfort in its place. We had walked for a while, probably the most we’d ever done, and the fog left droplets of water on our hair, penetrating us with a chill that was impossible to shake.

“How far do you think we are?” I asked Sheen, who hissed irritably at me. 

“How am I supposed to know? It didn’t look too far when I saw it, but I don’t know how long it takes to walk somewhere.”

“Are we going to sleep out here if we can’t find it?” Mun asked, casting a skeptical look at the mass of brambles creeping between the trees that we could make out behind the fog.

“Hey, it wasn’t _my_ idea to leave!” Probably remembering why we’d had to leave, Sheen suddenly deflated, blowing a breath. “Sorry. I’m just not sure how far the house is. It’s hard to gauge distances when I use my mind’s sight.”

Mun slowed down his steps to bump his arm against Sheen’s and said, “It’s fine. How bad can it be to sleep one night in the woods?”

Eventually, we reached a fork in the path. Standing at the crossing point, we looked left and right helplessly, as both sides looked almost identical to each other.

“Where to?” I asked Sheen, tucking my hands under my armpits to warm them.

He frowned. “I need to look. From what I’d seen I thought that we would just need to follow the path but I might have missed something.”

When Sheen used his mind’s sight, his actual eyes rolled back in their sockets, leaving only the whites. Mun and I were used to it by now, though I remembered that the first few times he’d done it when we were younger, I’d been terrified he was changing into something else, like the pictures of forest goblins I’d seen in one of Sister Sherin’s books. 

“Turn right,” Sheen said after a few seconds.

Mun and I both grabbed his hands, as he couldn’t see what was in front of him when he was using his power, and we set off down the path on the right. Soon enough, the path branched again but Sheen always confidently pointed out a way. Leading him between us, Mun and I were almost moving blind ourselves, so we had to walk even more slowly than we’d done before. Protruding gnarly roots and rocks were hiding under the leaves and sometimes one of us stumbled on them, risking dragging down the other two with the way we were clinging to each other. Exhaustion and the fog combined to make me start seeing things. I saw—or _thought_ I saw—movement at the corner of my eye, like hands reaching out, or even faces sometimes, faces with glowing eyes that reflected the light of the lantern. I saw strange shapes that looked more like the monsters I’d seen in the illustrations of books I’d read, grotesque forms that were too big, had too many limbs, or seemed to writhe in ways that couldn’t be natural.

“The shadows here are—” Mun started, looking thoughtfully at the dark shapes created by the glow of his lantern. 

“Don’t say it,” Sheen interrupted him, his white eyes cast upward. “I can still hear you and I don’t want to know about it.”

“They feel noisier than at the Fort,” Mun finished anyway.

Sheen tripped on something and his arm almost slipped from my grip, distracted as I had been by the visions I got from the fog. I dived to catch him by the waist, a cry escaping my lips. “Sheen, are you all right?”

I could feel him shake, maybe because he was as cold as I was, or because he was scared. “We aren’t too far now,” he said. “It’s over there, we have to keep going.”

We kept walking until the forest opened up and the fog revealed a tall house. A weird ethereal light shone on it, and I puzzled over that until I looked up and saw that a hole in the fog revealed a naked patch of dark sky, with a pale luminous crescent at the center of it. Little pinprick points of light surrounded it.

“It’s the moon,” Sheen said dazedly, his eyes normal again. 

For a while, we stared dumbly at the moon, which we’d never seen for real but had heard countless tales about. In the country of Korea, a tale recounted how a brother and sister became the sun and the moon to escape a hungry tiger—running away from a threat, just as we were doing ourselves.

_”The children went up to the sky. The brother became the sun. And the sister became the moon._

_“I am scared of the night,” said the sister._

_“I will be the moon for you instead,” said the brother._

_So the brother became the moon. And the sister became the sun.”_

I shook myself and took a better look at the house. It was nowhere as big as the Fort, but I figured it was big for a house, with steep roofs and a turret, stone balconies and brick walls that were covered with the thick naked roots of a dead creeping plant. Stone stairs led to an arched entrance, and we climbed them cautiously up to the heavy wooden door. As we stood there, daring each other with glances to open it, but none of us actually willing to do it, the door opened on its own. Well, it didn’t open wide; it looked more as if it hadn’t been properly latched shut and had simply drifted open. 

“We’re not going in there, are we?” Sheen said in a small voice, at about the same moment I managed to make myself move and push the door fully open. “Sem! Wait!”

Opening the entrance door let moonlight flow inside the entrance hall. The lower half of the walls were paneled with dark wood, with a closed door on my left, and a central rug leading to a staircase at the back. Behind me, I could hear Mun and Sheen argue in whispers until Mun said in a louder voice, “Just get in!”

We explored the lower floor, which consisted in a parlor, a dining room and a kitchen, and the first thing that struck us was how well preserved it all looked. A few dead leaves were strewn over the floor and thick layers of dust covered everything, but this was a house that had stood empty for at least sixteen years, if my own calculations were right. The wallpaper, rugs and curtains should have been moldy, the wooden parts should have been rotting, the plaster should have been crumbling, but they weren’t. We had parts of the Fort that had been unused for so long the sisters had ended up closing them for safety—so despite my lack of first-hand knowledge about the outside world, I had an idea of what an abandoned place should look like. When I tested the staircase, the stairs felt sound and didn’t yield under my weight. The upper floors were in an even better states, and the higher I climbed, the less dust and grime there was. I went to the attic and found boxes containing clothes, toys and books that barely smelled musty.

We reconvened in the downstair dining room, sitting around the dining table on upholstered chairs whose red velvet covering was only a little worn. 

“I don’t want to sleep here,” Sheen said, nervously drumming his fingers on the table and leaving darker imprints on the dust. “This place is creepy.”

“It’s fine,” Mun said, his eyes drifting to a shadowed corner, though he stopped himself before saying anything about how the shadows here felt to him. It was probably to avoid upsetting Sheen further, but it left me curious about what the shadows were telling him.

“It’s _not_ fine,” Sheen insisted. “You saw the door open on its own! Like—like the house is _haunted_.”

When we were little, Sister Elin got fond of telling us a variety of ghost stories from all around the old world, like of La Llorona, the weeping ghost of a woman who had drowned her children, or the _jiangshi_ , reanimated corpses that fed off the life essence of the living, or countless stories of haunted houses and hotels. Mun and I loved the stories, but they terrified Sheen so much that he couldn’t sleep most nights, and Sister Sherin had to tell Sister Elin to stop.

“It was probably just the wind,” I said, knowing as I said it that I was being disingenuous. 

I supposed I deserved him glaring at me. “Okay, let’s say it’s the wind. Then what about how… intact this place is? All the buildings I’ve ever seen in the outside world were crumbling. This place isn’t.”

“What if someone has been taking care of it?” Mun said.

“Who? The sisters? Someone else who survived the End of Time? Neither of those options are really any better. If it’s someone else, then maybe they won’t like finding us in their house. If it’s the sisters… well, we’ve actually been trying to get _away_ from them.”

What he said made sense, but I had a feeling that no one had been in this house in a long time. Saying it would only fuel Sheen’s fear of ghosts, so I switched tactics, “Have you seen any other building around? Because it’s sleeping here or outside in the woods. We can stay for one night and leave tomorrow.”

That argument made him cave, because none of us wanted to sleep in the woods. We’d never slept anywhere but in our own beds. There were beds with mattresses in the upper floors, but we decided to camp in the dining room together so it would be easier to leave if something happened. Despite being dead tired, I had trouble falling asleep, so I eventually disentangled myself from my blanket and left the dining room on my tiptoes, doing my best to avoid waking up my brothers.

I was curious to see if I could get anything from the people who had lived here, so I ran my hands along the paneling on the walls and on the staircase’s handrail. I didn’t glimpse any visual or auditory memory, but I got a feeling, much more distinct than I would have expected in a place that had been left alone for so long. I’m not sure how to put it into words—it was a warm feeling and it somehow felt pointed, not as though I was picking up on something that the inhabitants had felt a long time ago, but as though it was aimed at _me_ specifically. _Welcome_ , was what it felt like. _Welcome, welcome, make yourself at home._

It was unsettling, and I hovered between being scared and comforted. Climbing up the stairs again, I found pictures hung on the walls, which I’d somehow missed in my first exploration of the house. The protective glass was covered by a layer of grime, which I wiped with my sleeve to better have a look at them. They were pictures of people, sometimes big groups, sometimes just two or three. Some of the people I could recognize between pictures at various stages of their lives. The backgrounds varied but in some of them I could see the house in its prime, the creeping plant on its walls vibrant with deep green leaves. There was one person who could be seen on most of the pictures—a woman, with a skin darker than my own, as dark as Sister Oromo, and smiling brown eyes. Her hair was sometimes short, sometimes long and braided. Had she been the owner of the house?

I was so lost in my contemplation of the pictures that I didn’t hear Mun’s steps on the stairs as he came up to me. “Can’t sleep?” he said, startling me. “Wow, sorry. I thought you’d heard me coming.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I was lost in my own head.”

“Did you get any memories?” 

“Not exactly. Just… a feeling. It’s a nice feeling but there’s something strange about it.”

“Hmm, I see what you mean.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I wanted to know more but I also knew that he didn’t like to be questioned about the shadows. If he volunteered any information, it had to be on his own terms.

“Is Sheen still sleeping?” I asked.

“Last time I checked, yes. He was exhausted, I don’t think he’ll wake up any time soon.”

“Good, because if he wakes up and sees both of us gone, he’ll freak out.”

Mun hummed in agreement, raising the candle he’d brought with him to have a look at the pictures. I hadn’t brought any candle and yet I’d been able to see what was on the pictures well enough. Looking for a light source, I realized that pale light descended from a window on the landing. I had never known that moonlight could be so bright. 

“You don’t think that it’s risky to leave him on his own while he’s asleep?” I asked.

“No. You?”

“I don’t think this place is dangerous. I think we’re safe here.”

“I agree. The shadows are much quieter here.”

“You can’t hear them?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I hear them as much as I usually do, but they’re more… appeased, I think is the word.”

This matched what I was feeling, but I didn’t know whether or not I liked getting confirmation from the shadows. It occurred to me that although I’d made us run away to protect Mun from the sisters, I agreed with them on some level. I hadn’t ever really admitted it to myself, but I considered the shadows as evil in some way. But now I was wondering if maybe they weren’t evil, but simply a reflection of the place around them. 

“Thank you, by the way,” Mun said in an almost imperceptible murmur, still examining the pictures rather than looking at me. “And sorry.”

“What, you mean about leaving the Fort? We had to leave—not just because of you, but because the sisters weren’t being honest with us. What do they want us for, exactly? What’s the outside world really like? I mean, just this—” I made a broad handwave, encompassing the house as a whole. “Would you have thought that we would find a place like this, from what they’d told us? Sheen has only seen a fraction of the world, and only from above. I won’t believe that there’s absolutely nothing out there.”

I had been brought up on stories about the outside world, all of them of a more or less distant past, but they felt so present to me. I wasn’t resigned to all of it being gone for good. Mun brought his candle closer to one of the pictures, a portrait of the woman I’d noticed, sitting in an armchair that I recognized from one of the rooms on the second floor. 

“Do you think the house was hers?” he asked.

“Probably. She’s in a lot of those pictures. She must have lived here.”

Mun looked at me, his eyes as pale as moonlight. “Do you think she could still be here?”

—-

We didn’t leave after one night as we’d said we would. Even Sheen stopped insisting that we did. He didn’t look fully at ease, even after days of nothing scary happening. He was jumpy and uncharacteristically quiet, but he was probably more afraid of the outside world than he was of the house. Uncanny as it was, at least the house was comfortable. Actually, part of what made it so uncanny was how quickly we were able to make that abandoned house comfortable. We found brooms in a closet, exactly three of them, and in a day of hard work we’d gotten rid of all the dust and revealed the floorboards, furniture and decorative pottery underneath. We found linen in the closets upstairs and beat the dust out of the mattresses and pillows, hanging the bedsheets from the windows before we made the beds. We did the same with the clothes in the attic—each of us found clothes in our exact size—and we were able to change from the gray pants and tunics and woolen jackets that we had worn our whole lives. 

Three days after we’d escaped the Fort, the strangest thing happened. Sheen and I were cleaning up the stone stairs at the entrance, plucking the weeds that had grown in the cracks, while Mun cleaned the windows from inside—he’d opened the front window of the dining room left to the entrance, and the glass pane squeaked under his vigorous rubbing. I first noticed that something was strange because I kept blinking and frowning. The daylight was too bright and hurting my eyes, but I didn’t fully register that something odd was happening beyond feeling annoyed and uncomfortable. Then I felt a warm caress on my face and I absentmindedly rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand, wiping sweat in the process. 

I only looked up when I heard Sheen gasp. “Sem!” he exclaimed. “Sem, Mun! Look!”

He was pointing his finger and I followed it up, up, to the sky, until I gasped too at the sight of a small piece of blue sky and the violent light that poured down from it. My eyes filled with tears, both from emotion and from being blinded by what could only be the sun. I heard a muffled curse and glanced aside, seeing through my tears that Mun had dropped his dust-cloth outside in his surprise. 

He grimaced and then looked up, meeting my eyes with a crooked smile. I felt myself start laughing, a giddy sort of laugh that made Sheen look at me as if he were afraid I was losing my mind. “What?” I said, wiping my eyes. “It’s sunlight! Isn’t it the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” he said. His surprise had been replaced by the same broody look he’d been wearing for the past few days. 

“What is it?” I nudged him in the side. “Why the long face?”

“This place isn’t normal.”

“Well, no. But does it have to be a bad thing? Nothing terrible has happened so far, right?”

He shrugged and said, “I guess not,” but I knew him too well and he’d never been very good at hiding it when something bothered him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. 

“Nothing,” he said. He dragged a hand down his face and sighed. “I just haven’t been sleeping well, that’s all.”

I’d had some of the best sleep of my life since we’d gotten here, so I was surprised. I felt safe here, protected in a way I’d never felt before, and it helped me sleep like an infant. “What’s the problem? Are you still stressed about the house? I told you, I have a good feeling about it, and Mun said—”

“I know, I know. It’s just, I’ve been having bad dreams. I dream of creatures racing through the plains and forests, coming for us, and I don’t know, I’ve never had dreams like those before, they feel like…” He shook his head. “Never mind, it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid to have nightmares,” I said. “You can’t help it.”

“It’s stupid to let them bother me during the day.” He lifted his face, offering it to the sun. “You’re right, this is amazing. In all the times I’ve looked at the outside world, I never saw the sun, not even once.”

He gave me a real smile, so I decided he must just be tired and stressed from sleeping poorly, and that he would be okay. It was complacent of me, but I so badly wanted things to be good for us, so I would know that we’d been right to leave the Fort, that it blinded me to the warnings that Sheen’s powers were giving us. 

—-

While I did notice that Sheen still looked tired the next few days, I thought he would get better with more sleep and I was too entranced by the house to worry much about it. We got new sunny episodes, each lasting longer than the previous one, and this was a miracle that we couldn’t get enough of. In a polar opposite progression to Sheen, Mun became more relaxed and talkative, almost cheerful at times. He’d always been a reserved kid, but for the past couple of years he’d almost entirely shut down, even with Sheen and me, turning moody rather than just quiet. The change pleased me, confirming my thoughts that the house was a positive influence on him and the shadows. 

We hadn’t talked again about leaving, because we had no real purpose other than getting away from the Fort and it was uncertain that we would stumble on a place as nice as the house anywhere else. The sisters hadn’t followed us here, whether because they feared leaving the Fort or because they couldn’t find the house. Or, as was my personal theory, because the house itself was protecting us. With every passing day, I could feel my connection to the house grow stronger. The warm welcoming feeling I’d perceived on our arrival persisted, becoming more subtle and nuanced. Sometimes, it was almost as though the house were talking to me. This was a dumb enough thought that I never shared it with my brothers, as I could anticipate what they would say easily enough: talking with inanimate things wasn’t part of my powers, which were only about reading imprints left by people’s memories and emotions. But I knew I could feel something that was more than an imprint, and that this _something_ kept leading me to things I never could have found on my own. This was how I knew that a pipe was leaking in the kitchen before we saw any water, or that the gutters were cluttered with dead leaves and needed to be cleaned, or that I discovered a bird’s nest hidden under the eaves, in a place that was almost impossible to see from the outside or from one of the windows. Each time, something pulled me to the right spot, telling me what to do. I didn’t know how to explain it in any way other than the house talking to me. 

One night, I had a dream more vivid than any dream I’d had before. I was in a room, which I recognized as one of the rooms on the first floor by the location of the window and the door, though it had more furniture than it did in reality. Chairs and a sofa, a lamp by the window, small shelves filled with books, a potted plant on the windowsill. Someone was sitting by the window and I gasped when I recognized the dark-skinned woman I’d seen on the pictures. Her hair was made up in a myriad of fine breads, which were gathered in a loose bun weighing heavily on her neck, and she wore a long woolen dress with a collar that climbed up her neck. She sat in a strange kind of chair, which had two curved bands attached to the bottoms of its legs, allowing the woman to make the chair gently rock back and forth. 

“Who are you?” I asked. I wanted to get closer and touch her, but I was afraid that she would disappear if I did so.

“Oh, this is a difficult question,” she said with an amused smile. “If you’re asking for my name, then I’m afraid I have no satisfying answer to give you.”

“Are you—” This was a crazy question, but after all it was my dream and I was allowed to voice as many crazy thoughts as I wished to. “Are you the house?”

Her smile deepened, creasing a dimple in her cheek. She might have been making fun of me, but I sensed no mockery coming from her. “I guess we could say so. Yes, let’s say I’m the house.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds like you’re humoring me,” I said. “You can tell me the truth.”

“It wasn’t my intention to sound condescending. The truth is that I don’t fully understand what I am. I think I am not the same thing I used to be. What matters for the purpose of this conversation is what _you_ think I am. I don’t know what I am, but I know what _you_ are, Semiramis.”

“Wh-what?” I stuttered, taken aback by the sudden utterance of my name and the seriousness of the woman’s tone. “What do you mean?”

“You are this world’s salvation, its hope for a future. You and your brothers. But in order to do that, you need to save yourself first.”

“Are we in danger? Is it the sisters?”

“Something is coming for you.” She twisted her neck to glance outside the window at her back, which made me realize that the light had darkened, so much that I could barely make out the expression on her face.

“What is it?” I asked urgently. The air had cooled and it made the hairs on my arms stand up. “Should we be leaving the house? Should we run?”

She whipped her head to look back at me. “Absolutely not. The house is the only place where you’ll be safe. You have to stand your ground. I will help you. You have to—”

Someone screamed; it was Sheen’s voice and it startled me awake. I sat up in bed, my heart beating in my throat. 

“Sheen!” I shouted, wrestling with my sheet and blanket, scrambling down the bed once I was free. “Sheen, I’m coming!”

We’d claimed ownership of three bedrooms on the top floor—mine was at the far end of the corridor, next to Sheen’s and Mun’s rooms, which were facing each other. Just as I barged out of my room, Mun did the same, half of his hair standing on his head where it must have been lying on the pillow. We shared a brief look before rushing toward Sheen’s door. I was quicker and got in first.

“Sheen?” I called. “Are you all right?”

It was dark in the room and as my eyes were getting used to it, I heard him before I could see him. I heard his harsh breathing, hissing and puffing, then I could make out his form sitting in his bed, a hand on his chest. I could see nothing in the room with him and my pounding heart started to slow down. Had he had a nightmare? When his screaming had woken me up, it hadn’t occurred to me that it could have been nothing but a bad dream. 

“Hey, Sheen.” Mun walked past me and sat on the edge of Sheen’s bed. “Did you have a nightmare?”

Sheen jumped when Mun touched his shoulder, slapping the hand away. “No,” he said in an odd, rough voice that I’d never heard before. “It’s not a dream. They’re coming.”

“What do you mean?” I asked uneasily, thinking of my own dream and the warning the woman had given me. “Who’s coming?”

“The creatures in my dreams. But no, they’re not dreams. I knew there was something off about them; they happened when I was sleeping so I thought that I must be dreaming because what else could they be?” He was rambling, his voice quaking with emotion. “But that’s not what they are. I’m not dreaming. I’m _seeing_ , and now they’re almost there.”

“What, uh, what do they look like?” Mun asked, sounding as shaken as I felt.

“I don’t know, I can’t, I can’t have a close look at them, but their _eyes_. They’re like bottomless pits, like, like I’m going to tumble down into them if I look for too long.” A sudden shudder rattled his body. “Just thinking about those eyes—”

“Hell,” Mun said in a breath, and I wondered if that was a curse—this one had always been his favorite—or a statement.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There are creatures in the shadows,” he said. He’d never made such a plain, non-ambiguous declaration about the shadows before, so it took me by surprise. “I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they’re bad, like the sisters think they are. But they sound like what Sheen is describing.”

“I don’t think the creatures that are coming mean us well,” Sheen said, the irony in his voice too shaky to be convincing. 

“How do you know they’re coming for us?” I asked.

“They don’t look like they’re on a stroll. They’ve been racing the whole time I’ve been seeing them. They know where they’re going and they’re in a hurry to get there.”

A shiver ran down my spine. The woman in my dream, who may or may not have been a personification of the house, had certainly implied something similar. “Do you think you can stop them?” I asked Mun.

“I don’t know,” he said, combing his fingers through his spiky hair to try and tame it. “I can control the ones I can reach, sort of, but it’s… hard. They don’t like it. They fight me, all the time.”

“You said they were quieter here,” I said. New adrenaline made my blood pump as a plan formed in my mind. “Are they easier to control?”

“A bit,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

“Sheen can help you see where they are. If you can… summon, or whatever, the shadows around here, then maybe you can stop the ones coming for us.”

“What?” Sheen squawked. “You want us to _fight_ them?”

“What else can we do? You said they’re almost there, that they’ve been converging toward us for days. Even if we run, they will find us. We have to fight back.”

“Well, what will _you_ be doing to fight them?”

I walked to one of the walls and rested my open hand on it. I felt strangely calm now, alert, aware of the wall under my hand, of the house around me, in the same unthinking way that I was aware of my own body.

“I’ll be getting us help,” I said. 

We went down to the dining room, where we’d slept the first few nights, and lit up as many candles as we could. We sat on the floor in a circle, the orange, wavering light of the candles making a shield against the thickening darkness around us. Sitting cross-legged with his wrists resting on his knees and his hands loosely hanging, Mun had closed his eyes and his breathing had deepened. With each of his breaths, the shadows became more impenetrable, until a black veil had dropped over the room and we couldn’t see any of it anymore. A rustle of many harsh whispering voices filled the space, the words unintelligible. The air had become icy cold and I pulled at the sleeves of my pajama top to bury my hands in them. Visually, my world had been reduced to me and my brothers in our circle of light, but I could still feel the house’s presence as a comforting nudge at the back of my mind.

“Here goes nothing,” Sheen said, before he threw his head back and his eyes rolled in their sockets. At the same moment, a roar in the distance made me jump, the howl of a monstrous creature harbinger of death and terror. 

_And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard._

“They’re almost at the clearing,” Sheen said in the faraway voice that he used when he was seeing, his body rigid with tension.

“Give me your hand,” Mun said, then grabbed Sheen’s hand when he didn’t get an immediate reply. “Let me see.”

We’d recently started to experiment with combining our powers at the sisters’ prompting, but Mun had never liked it—I suppose he didn’t want us to have too close a look at the shadows. He made a sound as Sheen’s vision of the creatures hit him, almost a hiccup. He kept his eyes closed and his forehead creased with concentration. I took a breath and closed my own eyes, focusing on doing my part. I welcomed the house’s presence in my mind and the floodgates opened: I could feel it from its roof boarding to its foundations deep in the ground, could feel each of the beams supporting its weight, the pipes of its plumbing system, the mice scuttering in the attic, the water running down the gutters, the wobbly tiles on the roof, the blanket of dead ivy plant covering its walls. The windows became my eyes and suddenly, in a dizzying change of perspective as I became bigger and larger, I could see the creatures emerge in the clearing. 

They were formless, flickering shadows that formed darker patches on the already dark background of the forest at night, sucking in the faint light produced by the stars and moon in the sky. They had _eyes_ , though, eyes that pulled me in so fast that the resulting vertigo shook up my connection to the house. I felt my own body, tiny Semiramis’ body, start trembling, then I was the house again, then both at once and unable to make sense of whether I was feeling painful prickles on the skin of my arms and legs, or on the floorboards and bricks of the house, alternating between big and small, large and narrow, solid and squishy.

_Let me help, Semiramis! Let me help._

The warm voice of the woman from my dream washed over my panic in a gentle ripple, stabilizing my sense of self. I could see from the windows again, and that in the seconds or minutes that I had lost, new shadows had appeared and were now facing the ones that had just entered the clearing—somehow, I knew that the new shadows were the ones controlled by Mun, even though they looked identical to the intruders. Without warning, the two groups of shadows hurled themselves at each other. The fight was savage, groans and howls piercing the quiet night, the shadows clashing until they formed one dark struggling, writhing mass. Tendril of darkness that might have been limbs sometimes slashed the air and I could hear tearing sounds and shrieks of pain, could see fragments of shadow flying as though they were ripping each other apart. One of those shrieks was echoed by a very human scream of pain—it rattled me to my core, because I recognized it as coming from Mun.

“Mun!” I heard Sheen yell. “Are you hurt?”

_Mun is hurt! We have to help, we have to do something!_

_Calm down, Semiramis. Focus._

At that moment, I realized something that had always been obvious to me, but that I hadn’t felt as deeply as I did now, which was that the house wasn’t just an assemblage of wood and plaster and bricks and mortar. It was something _alive_ , not just sentient but capable of action. I didn’t have to remain a giant witness to my brother’s fight; I could help him. As I became aware of this, I felt a tingle ran along my limbs—or along the frame of the house, which amounted to the same thing. I didn’t just feel massive, I felt powerful now, like my namesake the queen Semiramis when she tricked her late husband’s army into following her commands. I didn’t have an army at my call, but I had the house and its surroundings. When I saw one shadow detach itself from the others, aiming for the house’s entrance, I knew that it wasn’t one of Mun’s shadows. The ground shook— _I_ made the ground shake—and part of the ivy plant that crept over the façade peeled away from the bricks to lash at the creature. It wrapped itself around its shadowed body, squeezed it tight, and, as I watched in cold fascination, the shadow was stretched and dismantled, the pieces turning into mist with a high-pitched whine that started strident and then faded into nothing. 

The fight between the other shadows had broken up and the creatures had scattered, some of them still fighting in clusters of twos or threes. Some tried to climb the staircase leading to the entrance, but the stairs grew to a disproportionate size and crushed the creatures that had the misfortune of getting stuck between two of them. With a low sound of stone grinding against stone, the top part of the stone handrail separated from the pillars and stretched, enlarged, then slammed into the nearby shadows. All of the ivy had now left the façade and it slithered over the ground like a tangle of snakes, whipping out of the grass to catch yelping shadows and bury them into the soil. Tiles flew off the roof like missiles, causing explosions of darkness when they hit one of the shadows. The house shook again and I felt dizzy, like the house, like _I_ , could unroot myself from the ground and start walking, could stomp over those monsters that had dared attack us. The whole clearing quaked and brick dust surrounded the house as its individual bricks clattered together. 

“Sem, what’s happening? Sem! Semiramis!”

_Come back, Semiramis. It’s over. Come back, or you’ll collapse the house and crush your brothers with it._

The injunction didn’t make sense at first. Come back, who? Come back from where? What brothers? I heard more shouting that sounded like it came from very far away. _Sem! Sem! Muninn!_ A creeping feeling of familiarity penetrated my awareness. I knew that voice, had known it all my life. I knew the names the voice was yelling. They’d meant something, once. They did mean something still.

_Semiramis. Semiramis. This is your name. You’re a child, not a house. Semiramis, I’m sorry._

The next moment, I knew nothing, just blackness and quiet. I woke up lying on my side on the floor and aching everywhere. I sat up painfully, my joints creaking, and held my head in my hands with a groan.

“ _Finally_ you’re awake. I thought that you… Are you all right?”

I blinked a few times until Sheen’s face came into focus. He was still sitting in the same spot as when we’d settled in the dining room some time earlier, with the difference that Mun was lying with his head in his lap. My heart leaped in my chest and I scrambled toward my brothers on my hands and knees. 

“What’s wrong with him? Mun, can you hear me?”

“I can’t wake him up, but then I couldn’t wake you up either and you seem fine.” Sheen gave me a narrow-eyed look, his mouth pinched tight. “You’re fine, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said absentmindedly, too busy giving Mun a once over, looking for obvious wounds. My head was pounding but it didn’t matter right now. “Is he hurt? I think I heard him scream at some point.”

“You heard right. I think the shadows getting hit hurt him too. Look.” Sheen pulled up Mun’s pajama top, revealing Mun’s stomach and the ugly purple bruise that marred the skin. “I don’t think anything is broken and he doesn’t have any open wound. Beyond that, it’s hard to tell whether he’s badly injured until he wakes up.”

“What about you?” I pushed a dark strand of hair off Mun’s eyes, but he didn’t stir. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Sheen said, shrugging awkwardly because he was holding onto Mun at the same time. “I wasn’t in any danger. What did you… what happened to you? You looked like you were in a trance and the house it—it did things. I saw everything, but I’m not even sure _what_ I saw.”

Looking around, I saw that white dust was covering the floorboards and understood with a jolt that it was plaster. The fuzzy memory I had of merging with the house and making it shake must have been real, even though it felt as flimsy as a dream, too formidable for my consciousness to handle it. A second look made me notice how easily I could see the room and how bright it was compared to my last memory of it. The light didn’t come from the candles, which were all piles of melted wax topped with a blackened wick; it came from outside, and it was daylight. 

I stared at the window, bright with the pale light of dawn from the most radiant morning we’d ever known. Only a groan coming from Mun managed to wrench me from my entrancement. His eyelids fluttered and he grimaced, then opened his eyes.

“Welcome back,” I said, heady relief flooding me. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” he groaned as he pushed himself up with Sheen’s support, his wincing belying his answer. “Is it over? Are we still under attack?”

“It’s over,” I said, then threw my arms around his neck. Sheen’s arms looped around both of us and for a moment we breathed into each other’s necks, feeling each other’s heartbeats. Something crumpled inside me and I felt immense weariness, my eyes burning with unshed tears.

“You two really scared me,” Sheen whispered, his voice trembling a little.

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. 

“I thought I would be left all alone.”

“I know, I know.” I unhooked one of my arms from Mun’s neck to wrap it around Sheen instead and hug him tighter. “I’m sorry.”

“Is that daylight?” Mun asked, his voice a little hoarse. 

I pulled away from him, swallowing to make the tight feeling in my throat pass. “Yes, it is.”

We helped Mun get up and limp to the window. Together, we looked outside at the front lawn, where the fight with the shadows had taken place. Streaks of black, like charred marks, were all over the grass. Although we could still see threads of fog wrapped around the trees, a wide patch of bare sky stretched over the house. In silence, we contemplated it. 

“Do you think it’s… all over?” Sheen asked. “The Dusk, I mean. Do you think that was what those shadows were?”

I thought of what the woman in my dream had said. _You are this world’s salvation, its hope for a future. But in order to do that, you need to save yourself first._ “If that was the Dusk,” I said, “I don’t think that we’re done with it. Can you still feel the creatures in the shadows, Mun?”

He glanced away from the window and following his look, I saw a shadow withdraw behind a dresser. “Yes,” he said. “But they feel different. More focused, like… like they’re listening to me.”

“Hostile?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. Attentive.”

Sheen heaved a long, put-upon sigh. “We’re just getting started, then. That’s great. The three of us against whatever that is that destroyed the world. I like our odds.”

There had been a buzzing in my ears since I’d woken up, which I now requalified as a humming. Quiet, gentle, comforting. The house, reminding me of its presence.

“We’re not alone,” I said. “We won’t be fighting it on our own.”

**Author's Note:**

> On the quotes that weren't referenced directly in the text: the first one is from 'Brother and Sister' by the Brothers Grimm ; the second is from "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe - more precisely from the imaginary tale “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning read by the narrator at the end of the short story.


End file.
